Worse, all kinds of people want to give you advice on how to look less fat. Magazines, friends, your gynecologist, your asshole ex-boyfriend’s sister who for some reason will not stop messaging you on Facebook. EVERYBODY has ideas to minimize your mammoth lardy offensiveness.

Odds are you’ve heard it all before. Wear looser clothing! I mean wear tighter clothing! Wear certain colors! But not the interesting ones! Wear vertical stripes! No wait that’s a myth and will make you look like an awning! Wear pants! No never wear pants! Wear Spanx! Just try not to have to pee! Ever! Biggify your hair! Or wear something else on your head -- something distracting, like a live chicken or a talking animatronic bust of Carl Sagan -- to draw attention away from your disgusting body! Carry a REALLY BIG BAG! No, bigger than that. Bigger. BIGGER.

In the midst of all this conflicting and often ridiculous information, how can you know how NOT to look so terrifically fat all the time? Luckily I’m here. To save you.

Many of the standard points for dressing to look smaller have been thoroughly, scientorfically disproven in recent years. Like the admonishment against horizontal stripes? NOW VERTICALS ARE YOUR ENEMY, Science says, and you ignore its warning at your fat-appearing peril.

It has also been said that wearing black, or some other dark and unobtrusive color, is key to looking smaller, but this is in fact a massive lie perpetuated by a powerful dark-clothing conspiracy. I will be revealing more on this tenebrous plot in a future expose but for now, just trust me that by continuing to wear monochromatic dark colors for their “slimming” effects” you are unwittingly participating in a scheme that will eventually mind-control you into shadowy oblivion.

(Weirdly this is not true for you goths, punks, postapocalyptic time-travel refugees -- in other words, Olivia -- and other dark fashion miscreants. You’re OK.)

For the rest of you, LOUD PATTERNS AND BRIGHT COLORS are where it’s at for fooling other people’s eyeballs into thinking you’re slighter than a crisp new blade of grass in the spring. And here are some excellent options for the new, thinner-looking you.

Yes, this ASOS dress looks like 1970s bathroom wallpaper. BUT WAIT. You are probably smaller than a wall. Thus, by drawing a visual comparison between yourself and that four-foot expanse between the marbled Formica vanity and the avocado-colored toilet you will invariably look way smaller. See, my logic is irrefutable.

Some will tell you that the peplum, as in this leather-trimmed ABS by Allan Schwartz peplum dress, works to make folks with smooshy waistlines feel slightly less exposed while wearing a pencil skirt, with the help of some nonfunctional flippity-floppity bit of fabric obscuring their middle bits.

NOT TRUE. The peplum actually functions to draw attention TOWARD any mid-body smooshiness and in so doing is appealing because it suggests that only a person WITHOUT shame over personal fattery in the torso’s Donut Region would wear a thing that says HEY, LOOK AT MY MIDSECTION WHERE I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE. I HAVE EVEN HUNG A LITTLE FLAG ON IT SO YOU KNOW.

Do you ever think about how -- in context with the unimaginably vast galaxy in which our relatively tiny planet spins, with us as even tinier and utterly inconsequential specks of sentient star-matter crawling over its surface -- our lives and everything we do in this life are ultimately meaningless blips in a universe that has existed for billions of years and will exist for billions more after all humans and all trace they ever lived are long dead and gone? I think about this a LOT.

Nothing is bigger than outer space, hence you are smaller than outer space. So by evoking the unfathomable expanse of the entire universe in your dress, with help from Domino Dollhouse's Galaxy dress, you look freaking infinitesmal. Logic again! Really depressing logic.

Kermit-The-Frog-inspired dressing for Grandmas, you’re thinking. But do not dismiss the Grandma sheath, my friends. The Grandma sheath is mighty. We could all learn a little something at the chubby knees of our fancy grandmas.

Actually, if I’m honest, I like this Adrianna Papell dress mostly because the color makes me think of mojitos. Who doesn’t want to look like a glass of rum, lime juice, sparkling water, and mint? Mojito glasses are kinda tall and skinny, right? Like models?

Man, I really want a mojito. Somebody bring me a mojito.

FACT: Bird-based dress items in the United States are federally required to be “flattering” per the 2009 passage of the Dresses With Birds On Them Act, or DWBOTA, a little-known law that passed with a slim bipartisan margin after a four-day filibuster in which a Congressperson from Delaware valiantly spoke for thirty-seven hours straight about the time he saw a man in an especially strange hat.

Apologies to our international readers, you’ll probably look like a whale in this eShakti bird dress. Maybe write a letter to your president or king or whatever asking for similar legislation.

So pink is kind of irretrieveably associated with breast cancer awareness these days, but that’s okay because you can use this kneejerk connection to your advantage by wearing a BRIGHT PINK dress -- like the above textured example from Simply Be -- that will automatically make everyone think you are a GIANT BREAST. Wait, I know some of you are recoiling in horror here but EVERYBODY LOVES BREASTS and everybody ESPECIALLY loves fat ones so this works for you!

Readers? Hello? Are you guys still there?

This Yours Clothing cartoon-print dress is a worthy representative of the Confusion Model of body camoflauge. The Confusion Model argues that wearing a collage print that looks like brightly-colored multimedia vomit will trick the eye into not registering the outer edges of the garment in question -- and therefore the body within it.

But, uh, even if that wasn’t a totally true thing I didn’t make up? This dress is AWESOME. The larger resolution image shows that it has cupcakes and Cookie Monster and playing cards and a robot head and frankly if people are so interested in trying to figure out what’s behind the cassette tape on your left tit they are really not paying attention to how massively large you are.

So there’s some suggestions for looking way less fat, sort of, in the springtime. Have you figured out what all these dresses have in common? Have you sussed out the real secret to looking less fat when you’re fucking huge?

Surprise, the secret is NOT GIVING A FUCK ABOUT HOW FAT YOU LOOK.

Seriously, wear stuff you like and that makes you feel great, whether it includes rad Cookie Monster tits or no. There are no magical cryptic tips for making your body invisible, and why would you want to? Your body is awesome, because it’s yours, even when you don’t always get along with it -- your body is the only body you get so you may as well be friends, or at least strike a truce that enables you to live with it without actively hating it all the time.

You don’t need to look smaller. You look fine. Everything about how you look is fine. I promise.